When, in 1941, the Trinidadian guitarist Lauderic Caton began broadcasting on the BBC with swing clarinetist Harry Parry's Benny Goodman-like group, it was the first time that the British public had heard an electric guitar played at a UK gig. The impact is hard to imagine now, with the instrument one of the most familiar sounds in music. But back then, amplification had only just begun to give the guitar a powerful solo voice, loud enough to break out of the massed ranks of a jazz band's brass and reeds.

The brilliant improvising of Charlie Christian was on Caton's mind when he arrived in London from Paris in 1940. He bought an amplifier that May, and was soon a focus of attention in West End nightclubs. And it was there, while playing at the Caribbean Club in 1944, that he met and transformed the career of Pete Chilver, who became one of the first British-born musicians to establish the electric guitar in this country, and has now died aged 83.

The relative shortness of Chilver's career has obscured the importance of what he achieved. But he was honing his skills at a time when many of the best young British musicians - among them Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth and George Shearing - were attempting to master the harmonic language of bebop.

Chilver and his guitarist friend Dave Goldberg used to frequent the Caribbean Club, where Caton encouraged them, built them amplifiers, and let them sit in with the house trio. But before this, at Feldman's club, at 100 Oxford Street, Chilver had witnessed jam sessions uniting locals with the American members of the Glenn Miller and Sam Donahue bands, and as a result replaced an ailing Carmen Mastren with Miller's band on a number of dates elsewhere. By the late 1940s, he was mastering the idiom's melodic intricacy and speed, and - like Scott and Dankworth - he became one of only a handful of London-based players who could keep up with the American innovators. His work drew praise from such luminaries as Benny Goodman and the Modern Jazz Quartet's John Lewis.

Born in Windsor, Berkshire, Chilver was the youngest of three children of a police sergeant and a musical mother. A boy chorister at Windsor Castle, he learned to play the piano before taking up the guitar. After leaving school at 16 in 1940, he formed his own Silver Sovereigns to play weekends at Skindles, the riverside hotel at Maidenhead known as "Soho on Thames".

That same year, he met the Cardiff-born black guitarist Joe Deniz at Feldman's, and through this friendship encountered musicians of African descent. George Formby and Django Reinhardt had inspired him initially, but he celebrated jazz as a black creation and could not believe his luck when Deniz asked him to deputise at rehearsals of Ken "Snake Hips" Johnson's West Indians.

Pianist Ralph Sharon was a near-neighbour and in 1942, while doing war work in adjacent factories - Chilver was a draughtsman - they played together in the Embassy Aces band in Slough, Berkshire. They were spotted by trumpeter Johnny Claes, who engineered their release to tour American military bases. After meeting Chilver in Bristol, the young John Lewis, stationed with the US army prior to the D-day landings, played with the band on several occasions, and 50 years later still remembered "that wonderful guitarist".

In 1946, Chilver joined singer Ray Ellington and was playing with him at the Bag O'Nails in the West End when Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli sat in. He then worked with accordionist Tito Burns who, together with Ellington, would help to popularise modern jazz in Britain.

The following year, Chilver heard his first Charlie Parker disc and was entranced by bebop's excitement and daring. But while Ronnie Scott and others visited the US for first-hand experience, Chilver worked on in London with George Shearing, Jack Jackson and Bert Ambrose and toured with Grappelli. Whenever he could, he played bebop with Sharon and other progressives.

At the Charing Cross Road flat he shared with Goldberg and the South African percussionist Jack Meyer, the visitors were legendary; composer Tadd Dameron, Ella Fitzgerald with new husband Ray Brown, and dancers from Harlem's Apollo theatre all came for sessions. In 1948, with Britain's leading bandleader, Ted Heath, Chilver reached a teenage audience, but his most prestigious job came the following year, accompanying Goodman at the London Palladium.

In 1950 he married Norma Domenico, the sister of Ted Heath's singer Lydia MacDonnell, and they moved to North Berwick, where Chilver managed the family hotel. He went on to run two family enterprises in Edinburgh, one of which, the West End Cafe, became Scotland's major modern jazz venue. But he never played professionally again. Norma and his son David survive him.

· Peter William Chilver, guitarist and hotelier, born October 19 1924; died March 16 2008